Numerous technologically relevant material processing tasks can very efficiently be solved with CO2 lasers of the most various specific designs. Frequently, theses tasks are however bound to pulsed radiation, e.g., drilling with high quality requirements. But exactly this is a certain weak point of the known commercially available CO2 lasers: their capability of being pulsed is substantially limited by the wavelength range of the radiation in the infrared range at about 10 μm by that there are only a limited number of optically transparent materials that are suitable for modulation, in particular of the Q-switch, at the high mean powers required for material processing by laser. Beside mechanical switches with their known drawbacks, practically exclusively acousto-optic modulators (AOM) based on germanium and electro-optic modulators (EOM) based on CdTe are used for Q-switching of modern CO2 lasers, however with relatively narrow limits with regard to the attainable mean power for the resonator design being common for a long time. One way out of this conflict is demonstrated by the Q-switched CO2 laser system described in WO 2013/113306 A8, which in principle allows mean powers of Q-switched CO2 laser systems up to the kilowatts range.